Computer woes

For some reason, my computer hangs on the very first screen for a long time—where it just says "Pentium 4 with HyperThreading" or whatever, before it even shows the "starting Windows" screen.

That Pentium screen used to flash by in about half a second; now it seems to be there for about a minute.

I'm not sure what I could have changed in the past two weeks or so (it was fine until then), especially since I presume it would have to be something in hardware, rather than messing up Windows config or something.

Maybe some component is dying? RAM is taking a while to settle down to a stable state? The computer is having trouble contacting the hard disk?

Known Anomalies in Unicode Character Names

Once a Unicode character has been given a name, that name cannot be changed, even if it later turns out that the name was inappropriate or wrong.

Here's a technical note talking about some "known anomalies" in those names.